Building Out the EV Charging Network

evVG April 30, 2025 Meeting Transcript

Meeting Facilitator

• Mike Austin, Executive Editor, Road and Track Magazine
• Nathan Niese, Managing Director & Partner, Boston Consulting Group

evVG Member Participants:

• Tom Healey, VP, Facilities, Nouria Energy Corporation
• Gabe Klein, Former Executive Director, U.S. Joint Office of Energy & Transportation
• Chris Normandeau, Director, FirstService Energy
• Darren Palmer, Global Vice President Electric Vehicle Programs, Ford Motor Company
• Deb Peck Kelleher, Deputy Director, Alliance for Clean Energy NY
• Francisco Pineda, Executive Vice President, NYC Economic Development Corporation
• Sophia Schuster, Policy Principal, Michigan EIBC
• Jay Smith, Executive Director, Charge Ahead Partnership
• George Turner, Conference Producer, Nicholson Turner Ltd
• Fred Yonghabi, Sr, Specialist, Con Edison

Presenter

• Garrett Fitzgerald, Sr. Director of Transportation , SEPA, the Smart Electric Power Alliance

Guests

• Bill Crider, Sr Director – Charging and Energy Services, Ford Motor Company

Vision Group Network Founders

• Myra Kressner, Founder, Kressner Strategy Group
• Eva Strasburger, President, StrasGlobal
• Roy Strasburger, CEO, StrasGlobal

Meeting:

Mike Austin:

Welcome everyone to the meeting. Roy has a little bit of housekeeping so we’ll start with that. We do have some new people here, which is really exciting. It’s nice to see the group grow. We’ll do a quick round of introductions later, but let’s get all the official business out first, if you want to take that, Roy.

Roy Strasburger:

Thanks. This is the publication and anti-trust statement that you all signed [Publication & Antitrust Statement Shown on Screen]. This is the document that was included in everybody’s membership application and form. I just want to let everybody know that we are recording this conversation. The transcript will be digitally published as part of our Vision Report. I want to remind you, you do have the opportunity to declare that something is off record, either before you say something or after you say it. Just please let us know.

Also, some of us, some of you, are competitors or could be competitors, and at VGN we take the antitrust requirements very seriously. If we feel that there’s any discussion in regard to price fixing, market fixing, market segmentation, or anything else that may violate antitrust laws, either in letter or in spirit, we will ask you to stop. If you do not stop, then we will politely eject you from the meeting. That is the publication and antitrust statement. Back over to you, Mike.

Mike Austin:

All right, thanks. Also, just expanding on that, if you want to say something off the record, like Roy said, this is being recorded and will be published. If you say something and go, “Oh, wait, that needs to be off the record,” just make sure you state it and it’s clear and then we can make sure that that’s left out. Quick reintroduction, I’m Mike Austin. I’m the executive editor at Road & Track, which is not particularly involved with electric vehicles, although we do cover them, and a former analyst and it’s a topic I enjoy greatly. Our other facilitator, Nathan Niese, is more involved in that world and Nathan will be handling the Q and A today, switched up roles from last time.

Like I said, we have a few new members. Pease give a quick introduction and then we’ll do an update from the last meeting before we roll into Garrett Fitzgerald, our guest presenter. Who wants to go first?

Gabe Klein:

I can go if you like. Hey everybody. Gabe Klein here, former executive director of the U.S. Joint Office of Energy and Transportation, which, for those of you that don’t know, was first office in the federal government to span energy and transportation departments and reported to both deputy secretaries. Our job was really to facilitate clean, sustainable fuels and EV charging throughout the private sector and the public sector and actually to encourage collaboration between the two. I also, prior to that, had my own firm, Cityfi, which is an ongoing concern, and ran the D.C. Department of Transportation and the Chicago Department of Transportation, but the majority of my career has been in the private sector and so excited to meet many of you and hopefully contribute positively to the conversation.

Tom Healey:

Hi, this is Tom Healey. I’ll jump in here next. I’m with Nouria Energy out of New England, although we do have a southeast branch now. We’ve got about 300 gas station convenience store locations and we have been very active in pursuing grant funding from both government agencies as well as utility companies to enable us to install DCFC (DC Fast Charging) chargers at our gas stations. We’ve got probably about 20 plus locations now with charging stations and we’ll talk further about how we’ve been impacted by the new administration. Thank you.

Roy Strasburger:

I’ll go next. Good afternoon. I’m Roy Strasburger, one of the co-founders of Vision Group Network, and I want to welcome everybody here and just add a couple more things along the lines of what Mike was talking about a moment ago. During our conversation today, we would appreciate you keeping your microphones on mute when you’re not speaking to reduce any ambient noises. If you’d like to say something, please raise your hand with the hand icon so that we can make sure everybody gets a mention as they go along. Finally, please keep your camera on as much as possible, but if you do need to leave for a few moments, feel free to turn your camera off. It makes it a little bit more engaging if everybody has their camera on. Anyway, I want to just say, welcome and glad to have everybody with us. Thank you.

Darren Palmer:

I’ll go next if you’d like. I’m Darren Palmer with Ford and my job is global vice president of electric vehicle programs. My team has been responsible for developing the current range of vehicles that you may know from our company and also our future electric vehicles. We are a huge user of the network and growing and we put together the largest charging network in America called Ford Blue Oval Network. We’re extremely interested in this subject and how we can make charging better for all of our customers and for everybody really.

Mike Austin:

Thanks. Do we have any other new people?

Garrett Fitzgerald:

Yes, Garrett Fitzgerald here. I am the senior director of transportation at SEPA, the Smart Electric Power Alliance, and I recently joined the group. I’m also going to be giving the presentation today and joining the conversation. I’ll leave it at that because I’ll give you a little more of an overview of my organization as a context setting for the presentation, but I’m really happy to be here.

Roy Strasburger:

Thanks. And Darren, would Bill like to introduce himself as your special guest?

Darren Palmer:

Absolutely.

Bill Crider:

Hi everybody. Bill Crider. I’m the senior director of charging energy services at Ford Motor Company. My team’s really accountable for our overall go-to-market strategy, customer success, and business operations for our charging efforts, home, public and dealer charging. Happy to be here.

Mike Austin:

All right, thanks. As I mentioned, we’re all pretty eager to get to Garrett’s presentation, but just before we start it, I wanted to take a quick 10 minutes or so and open up the table to any thoughts on things we discussed in the last meeting or developments since then. It has obviously been a bit of a wild ride with changes day by day with huge implications for charging, EV sales and grants, and charging and electrification equipment. Does anybody have any major thoughts or calm words for everyone to stay relaxed?

Roy Strasburger:

Karl Doenges gave our presentation last time about the changing landscape of EV regulation in the EV industry. I will say that I think he probably underestimated the tariffs that were going to be happening and how that may have an impact not only on the importation of cars, but also, possibly, on the construction of cars in the United States, as Darren and Bill might refer to, or if you’re bringing component parts from outside the country, although that’s changed in the last couple of days. Also, I think tariffs are going to have an impact on building out some of the infrastructure, which I think Garrett’s going to talk about a little bit. I’d be interested to know, I haven’t seen anything in regard to major changes in regulations in the last couple of months, if anybody had any comments on that, I’d be really interested in hearing about it.

Gabe Klein:

I’ll just say from my standpoint, since I recently came out of the government, my sense is that there’s a lot of funding paused, but four-fifths of the funding, whether it’s NEVI (National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure) funding or CFI (Charging and Fueling Infrastructure) Discretionary Grant funding or EVC-RAA replacement funding, has actually been apportioned. Most of it’s been obligated. Some of that money’s already been spent. I think there was a desire from the new administration to significantly slow things down and if they could pause permanently some of the disbursements, I’m sure they would, but legally, I think that would be very hard to do as many of you know. Now, that last 20% of the funding, it’s possible that as they are rejiggering their rules and so forth around that, they could alter the path of that last 20%. I think it’s important to distinguish between the 80% and the 20% that was not yet allocated.

Mike Austin:

Thanks. I would even add to that too that one thing we discussed in the last meeting was this question of, do we have enough products available and enough cars in the market that some of the EV landscape has momentum to roll, regardless of the incentives or what’s in the future? I don’t know, I don’t want to put you on the spot too much, but Darren, is that a thing where we’re seeing increased EV sales? I might be mistaken, but I think that the market share tailed off a little bit in the last month or quarter, but in general, they continue to sell more and we have a lot of new offerings on the market in the U.S. Is this an issue of uncertainty or is it more just the timeline is ever shifting and you’re always adjusting?

Darren Palmer:

Well, up until now, we have seen increases continuously. It’s just a matter of how fast and some of the earlier projections had extremely steep ramp. Also, companies like Ford, a very fast investment schedule predicting huge EV growth. We’re seeing projections updating that are showing less growth, but it’s still growth. We are still seeing that quarter over quarter, a month-over-month growth over the past year. That’s still continuing.

I think the question is how much investment will continue to go in given uncertainty and how that affects how much new product comes into the marketplace. I think a lot of manufacturers are working on a lot of new products, especially in the more value area of the market, which has long been seen as an area of the market that the U.S. needs. Countries like China have long moved into the $20,000 accessible vehicle field and they’ve got some really good incentives there as well. They’ve seen massive growth. We don’t have those products here yet in the U.S. and it remains to be seen how the uncertainty in tariffs will affect those investments from many companies.

Mike Austin:

All right. Jay, please go ahead.

Jay Smith:

Yes, I was just going to add, I don’t want to discredit the value of funding like NEVI funding and things like that we just talked about last time, but I think from the EV charging growth side of it, the two indicators that are going to really show that are what they were just talking about, the EV sales. When you look at convenience stores, truck stops, gas stations, and those that want to offer EV charging, they’re looking at the demand, they want to meet the market. If that market continues to grow, that will create more of an incentive to invest more in the charging market. Then, second, as we’ve talked about, I think the other factor is also more so than just NEVI funding, but the policies around that and whether it’s a fair and competitive market. I think those two factors there are going to be a driver that people are looking at very carefully as to how fast the charging market side will actually grow.

Mike Austin:

Gabe?

Gabe Klein:

Just to chime in, the federal funding, I think we figured we needed 70 to 80 billion to build out 500,000 chargers, so our money was always gap filling money, particularly for locations that don’t pencil, particularly very rural areas where you need to build substations and so forth. In some cases, urban areas where you have lower income folks, but it was always gap filling money. It was always meant to be a catalyst to get the private sector to invest. I think sometimes that was lost in the press and these are some of the harder locations to build and that’s why the goal was 2030 with the majority of 500,000 chargers being privately built.

Jay Smith:

While that wasn’t reported in the media as much, I think that’s how the industry took it as that’s how that funding is, that it wasn’t enough money to actually solve the problem, nor was it intended to be. I think that’s why I say less important than what has happened there, I think there are other bigger factors at play that are influencing the growth of, or slowed growth, if we actually see that of the EV charging market.

Gabe Klein:

Yes, 100%.

Mike Austin:

That’s great because that segues perfectly into Garrett’s presentation, which is the EV Charging Puzzle: Building Both the Grid and the Chargers. With that, I will hand it over to Garrett Fitzgerald, who is the senior director of transportation electrification at the Smart Electric Power Alliance. Feel free to introduce yourself more.

Garrett Fitzgerald:

Yes thanks, Mike and everyone. As mentioned, I’m the senior director of transportation electrification at SEPA, and I’ve been with SEPA for four and a half years now leading all of our EV related work. Prior to that, I was with Rocky Mountain Institute, now RMI, for about a decade. I’ve been working in and around the EV charging space for quite a while. What I offered to the group was to share from my experience working with utilities, regulators, ChargePoint operators and customers, what are all the considerations that are important to think about as we envision how we’ll build out all this infrastructure that we were just talking about. I think my objective is to make sure that we all have the foundational understanding of what is motivating or constraining those different stakeholders and then hopefully, have a 60-minute conversation on how do we continue on from where we are now to where we need to be with charging infrastructure. I do have some slides. I’m going to try to take 25 minutes to get through them and hopefully, we can have a good conversation.

[Slide #1 – Introduction, Slide #2 – Today’s Agenda, Slide #3 – The Fundamentals] Let me start just a little context on SEPA and that may be helpful for where and how I got these perspectives. SEPA is a 501(c) 3 member-based nonprofit. We have about 1,000 members, 600 to 700 of those members are electric power companies or electric utilities and then the balance are hardware and software vendors that provide services into the energy transition space, other consultants, nonprofits, really every type of stakeholder group is eligible to be a SEPA member. Essentially, what we do and why we exist is to provide research, education, consulting, convening and facilitation to our members who are navigating this energy transition. I share what I share with a unique perspective of talking to all of the different stakeholder groups.

Customer Behavior [Slide #4 – Charging vs. Gas] I want to start out by acknowledging as we transition from vehicles that are fueled with fossil fuels to electric vehicles, there really are a couple of fundamental shifts happening, both in how customers perceive this refueling, but also how we plan for that. One of the big shifts is, now you’re able to refuel your vehicle on a number of options, a level one, a level two, a DC fast charge, perhaps at home, perhaps at the workplace. These over on the left really are a paradigm shift in how we refuel our vehicles. Essentially, you can think about charging on a level two becomes something you don’t actually have to think about if we do things well and you park, plug in and you’re good to go.

In that way, charging integrates into your life rather than the other way around. You have to integrate into where the fueling infrastructure is. At the same time, when you’re thinking about destination or on the go, that really is a little bit of an adaptation that’s going to be required in terms of what customers expect and their experience. Then, also, on the commercial side, related to operational logistics. That’s largely just due to the speed at which we can refuel electric vehicles is not likely to reach the same as with the gas. In many perspectives, doesn’t need to get all the way to a one-minute fill up.

EV Infrastructure [Slide #5 – EV Charging needs…] I share this so we can then jump into, well, we have more options. What is the charging that is going to be needed to have a thriving electric vehicle market over the next decades? This came out of NREL (National Renewable Energy Laboratory) and I think this is a pretty helpful graphic where the vast majority of charging ports are going to be private charging points level two likely at home or at the workplace. What we’re going to spend more of our time talking about today is the trunk for these public fast charging and the branches. This is charging out at retail locations and there’s a lot of charging to be built. It’s important to understand that right now, the majority of charging that happens is happening at home on a level one or level two. Then, the majority of the challenges in building infrastructure currently are happening with the fast chargers.

Customer Behavior [Slide #6 – Who charges at home?] There’s always this chicken and the egg concept. Today, I think this was from a couple years ago, two-thirds of charging happens at home and then the balance is public or workplace. As the demographic of vehicle ownership changes and enters the mass market, it’s expected that some of that residential charging is going to shift to public. That’s in part because we’ll have more public infrastructure, but we’ll have more owners who are living in multi-unit dwellings or residential locations that don’t have access to a dedicated charger. We, as an industry, have an influence of what this chart looks like in 2030 and 2035 because it depends on what we build and how we educate those customers. I think perhaps, it’s always important to remember how we charge as an EV owner is a behavior. It’s a new behavior for us. The majority of people have not owned an electric vehicle and the first time they do it, they’re going to be setting their charging habits. So what we set up for them will influence that. And that has implications for the utility, which we’ll get to later in there is an optimal way from a utility perspective to build up the infrastructure and then there are many suboptimal ways.

Utilities [SLIDE #7 – EV’s are different from other…] If you talk to a utility or you’ve worked with a utility, they may tell you, we exist to serve customer loads. That’s why utilities are in existence and they’re pretty good at serving new loads. However, EV loads are substantially different than other residential loads and also other commercial loads, in part because they’re growing quite fast. They’ve been doubling every two to three years, which is much faster load growth than any other discrete load growth source. They’re significantly higher power than any other residential load. If you think about your home today without an EV, it may peak at 3, 4, 5, 6 kilowatts, depending on the appliances that you have, but you install a level two and now, you’re doubling or more that peak.

The graphic here on the right is just showing an example of a residential transformer that may have a capacity of 35 KVA or kilowatts. If five homes on that transformer have an EV, then all of a sudden, you’ve overloaded that transformer. Then, the lower figure shows when we’re talking about the higher power level two charging, so the 19.6 kilowatts, you can get to that threshold very quickly. For this reason, utilities are treating EV load growth in a unique way.

[Slide #8 – Charging Depots represent] And that same unique aspect of load exists for the commercial charging and where I imagine the majority of our conversation is going to happen today. If you look at this graphic here, the main point I’m trying to make is commercial EV charging load is on the order of magnitude of load that utilities are historically very well-built to serve, a new outdoor stadium, a new Empire State Building, but the issue really is the timeline to build an outdoor stadium, which is going to have five megawatts of needed capacity is much longer than the timeline to build and install 20 DC fast chargers, which would have the same power requirements. So you get potential site hosts or site owners wanting to come in and find five megawatts, 20 megawatts of capacity. That is something that if it exists, the utility can get you set up in six to eight months, but if that capacity doesn’t exist, we have to build infrastructure that takes two to three years. We’re really dealing with a mismatch in the planning and building cycle of what loads used to look like and what loads are looking like now.

[Slide #9 – Most EV load is…] The last concept before we sort of move on to different stakeholder perspectives is most EV load is inherently flexible. What I mean by that is, your vehicle is parked and often connected to charging for much longer than it needs to get the charge that it needs. This is true for home charging, when you would come in and plug in your garage or workplace charging, where these light bars are how long the car is parked, the dark bars are roughly how long it takes to get 50 miles of charge on the respective charger type. What you see is for this branch or retail convenience charging, there’s less flexibility or no flexibility. On the DC fast charging there is almost no flexibility because by definition, this person is coming to charge as quickly as they can. Then, with fleets, it depends.

[Slide #10 – Utilities are starting to leverage] What is happening now within the utility landscape is utilities are putting together programs or pricing signals or other mechanisms that allow them to capture some of this flexibility, whether it’s to shift from peak times that are highly cost ineffective to provide generation or they’re trying to maximize the consumption of renewables. The bottom line is, we are now putting in place programs and have the communication technology to actually manage and shift these loads. With that, I was meaning to bring everyone up to speed — and many of you, if not all probably are — that there’s a number of different ways that we’ll charge your vehicles and we’re going to be using a mix of all of those.

[Slide #11 – Understanding Stakeholder Perspectives] Now, I want to jump over to the stakeholders and make sure that we all understand what is the role of a regulator, how utilities think about their business and investing and how that implicates challenges with building infrastructure.

[Slide #12 – Obligation to Serve vs. Cost..] Really, it starts with recognizing that utilities are regulated monopolies and they’re regulated by the government via our public utility commissions. What has happened over the past 100 years is this regulatory compact where the utilities are allowed to have a monopoly. In exchange, they are required or obligated to serve all customers with reliable and affordable power. That’s where it gets challenging, is defining reliable and affordable power. The really essential role of the regulators is to balance the needs and the rights of the consumers with the needs and opportunities of a utility to operate as a business, a profitable business. This covers things like, who is going to be paying for infrastructure, which customer class, how long of a timeline are we thinking about the benefits that come to rate payers? Then, ensuring that there is competition and market fairness, again because this is a regulated monopoly.

[Slide #13 – EV growth & utility investment] Some of the important components of this recognizes investor-owned utilities that are regulated earn their profit with a regulated return on their rate base. Their rate base is just a number that is essentially all of their capital expenses on their balance sheets at any given time. What this means is, a utility has a financial incentive to spend capital and to put infrastructure in the ground and the regulators then have to balance that incentive to make sure that utilities are not overbuilding for more capacity than they need to so that they can artificially inflate their profits and get that regulated return on a larger number. I think understanding that historically, utilities have been building new load for the past 100 years. With the exception of the past 20 years, there hasn’t been a lot of load growth.

And so, utilities didn’t have as much obvious capital to invest, and regulators have gotten very focused over the past 20, 30 years of ensuring that every capital expense a utility invests in is prudent and is going to result in reasonable and affordable rates for the customers. And so, you can get the sense that there’s this little bit of tension now where for a long time a utility’s job was to make sure you’re not over-investing, but now we’re at a point where we’re seeing massive load growth from transportation and from data centers. And the utilities need to again build and spend a lot on infrastructure, and the regulators are the ones who are approving if that happens and who pays for it.

And so, in the context of EV charging, you can think about if one of you is building a new store or a new DC fast charging hub that requires a feeder upgrade, a transformer, or maybe a substation, who pays for that? Is that going to be the company that covers that cost? Is that going to be the utility? Or is that going to be all rate payers or a subset? And those are the decisions that the regulators are tasked with overseeing, and how it works is a utility will propose a program or a process and the regulators will assess it and see if it is just and reasonable.

[Slide #14 – Municipal Utilities (Munis), …] The other important issue to understand is we have 3,300 utilities in the U.S., and they’re a mix of investor-owned utilities, municipal utilities and cooperative utilities. And how you work with them and what motivates them is different. So, if you think about the IOUs, that these are the much larger utilities that are publicly traded often and they’re heavily regulated by the State Utility Commission, which we just walked through.

And again, they rely on rate-based capital investments and they’re for-profit entities, so they have their own profit motive to invest in EV infrastructure, but they’re regulated. Now, municipal utilities are more focused on public service and community benefits, and they are not regulated in the same way with a commission. They are regulated often by a city council or a board of directors. Cooperatives are similarly not regulated by the utility commission but by a board of directors and owned by their members. And so, munis and co-ops can move faster and can be a little bit more flexible, but they have more limits around how they raise capital and how they invest in new infrastructure.

[Slide#15 – From power plant to plug] So, understanding the regulatory model of utilities and the different utility structures, now I want to move over to why a utility has to be thoughtful about how EVs load growth impact their systems. And so, this is a very simplified overview of how you can deconstruct the grid, generation, transmission, distribution, all the way up to the service cable. And essentially what we’re seeing here is as we see more EVs on the system, it has some impact on generation, but usually only a limited number of hours each year – maybe 5 hours, maybe 100 hours – but this is when the overall system is constrained. Where we’re seeing more issues and more costs are on the distribution side of things where we have to upgrade a transformer or a feeder, and this is really where the utilities are focusing on and the expenses are coming.

[Slide #16 – Customer Expectations vs. Grid…] And then, lastly shifting to the customer. When I first started talking about fast charging 10 years ago, everyone was talking about 50 kilowatts. And now 50 kilowatts is considered slow charging and we’re seeing 350, 500 and megawatt charging now. And so, we’re setting this expectation for faster and faster charging, but that has implications on the infrastructure required upstream of the chargers, and the cost that an operator pays. And so, there’s this need to balance customer expectations versus grid realities for this.

[Slide #17 – Navigating the economics] And then, extending that from the charge point operator’s perspective, the bottom line for revenue is utilization of your chargers and achieving a high enough utilization that you earn enough revenue but not such a high utilization that folks are queuing up and having a bad experience. And so, revenue is almost linearly tied to utilization, but costs are not. So the demand charges, which are a good big component of operating costs of a fast charger, are independent if that charger is used 1 time or 100 times during the month. And so, really understanding the higher power we go, the bigger the demand component will be, which disconnects revenue and costs from utilization.

[Slide #18 – Customer Perspective] And so, really what I wanted to put in people’s minds, because this is really an opinion of mine and maybe not one that’s shared by the group, is that many prospective EV owners believe or feel that they’re going to need ultra-fast charging and is essential for them to have for their vehicle. But what I found anecdotally and rooted in some data is in practice the majority of EV charging occurs at home, offering a convenience and a cost savings. And so, we’re likely to see people wanting a lot of public infrastructure and needing it to allow us to make this transition, and then in operations, when possible, folks are going to prefer to charge at home or at the workplace where it’s integrated into their lives, and public fast charging becomes supplementary and not primary to fueling our fleet.

EV Infrastructure [Slide #19 – The State of Infrastructure] So with that, I’m going to transition to where are we in the U.S. in terms of infrastructure invested, and how that compares with other countries, to then give us some perspective on what’s happening.

[Slide #20 – Global EV leaders] So, I thought this chart was really helpful in demonstrating that there are a number, dozen or more countries that are far ahead of the U.S. in EV adoption, and it’s not just Norway and it’s not just China. And what you can see there are there are some countries that are far ahead, a decade ahead if you look on this chart, and the U.S. falls there in the middle. And what that means is perhaps we can learn from some of the advances that have been made in Europe and in China.

[Slide #21 – Ratio of vehicles] And then, another way to look at where we stand, and apologies for those who don’t like charts, you’re going to see another five charts, but I think in some cases they’re effective at making the point here.

So, the blue line is the number of vehicles per charger. And so, the larger that blue line, the worse off you are in that you’re sharing more vehicles having to use a charger. And another way to look at that, which incorporates the power of those chargers, is the kilowatt per vehicle. And so, you can see some of the countries on the lower end have five kilowatts of public charging per vehicle, whereas the U.S. is down at around one or two. And so, these are some of the metrics that may be used to think about how do we continue to build out infrastructure that’s going to allow us to enable charging?

[Slide #22- Publicly installed light-duty by fast chargers] But then, if you look at where we stand comparatively, and I think this is just going to make the point again, China is very much in the lead in charging globally with 85% of fast chargers and 60% of slow chargers today are in China.

[Slide #23 – Publicly installed light duty by slow chargers] And then, if you compare that to slow chargers, you can see there’s a little bit more dispersion on that scale. So, now we’re looking at China and Europe relatively on similar scales and the United States still pretty far behind on slow chargers. Now, when you look at it this way you may think that the U.S. is pretty far behind, but in fact because we have fewer vehicles being adopted we’re actually on track to where we need to be.

[Slide #24 – U.S. non-home charging needs] And that’s what we’re seeing here in this chart. As of the beginning of the year, I think we had roughly 50,000 DC fast charging ports including those that are temporarily unavailable, and based on projections of what we needed a couple of years ago we’re right on track with the number of fast charging. But you can see we need to build a lot more fast charging here in the next decade to get to that 500,000 that was talked about at the beginning.

[Slide #25 – New DCFC Ports in the US] Another trend that is promising is a decade ago almost all of the fast chargers being built were the Tesla supercharged network, and now over the past five years we’ve seen more of that growth coming from non-Tesla chargers.

[Slide #26 – Non-home EV Chargers needed] One last chart here just to provide a differing opinion here. This was from the ICCT (International Council on Clean Transportation) where they project that actually we need something like 300,000 DC fast chargers here by 2030, and with the forecasted investment in the NEVI funding, federal government states we’ll have more than we need. Obviously, this was projected years ago before any of the current policy shifts, but I tend to not agree that we are fully on track to have all of the DC fast charging that we will need, but just offering that as another perspective.

[Slide #27 – Why scaling..] So, closing all that up and recognizing in the charts I showed 26 million level two chargers are going to need to be built at people’s residences, and we only need to build a couple million public charging, many of those fast chargers. But the hard part is that public infrastructure and the hard part is that fast charging, and primarily because of all of the different complexities of working with utilities that are regulated that have different motives that make it slow to interconnect charging, slow to build infrastructure and slow to get permits. And so, really collaboration across the utilities, the automakers and charging providers will be key to solving some of these.

[Slide #28 – The Importance of Charging Curves] And so, I’m going to take a hard pivot here for the last three or four minutes of the presentation, just to introduce a little bit of a different concept but I think it’s important and ties back to some of the challenges that were raised in the previous slides.

EV Charging [Slide #29 – Charging Speeds Decline] And really everyone has probably some awareness of this concept of charging speeds decline at higher state of charge, and in fact the charge curve differs widely across EVs. And so, what we’re looking at here is the power that a vehicle can accept versus the state of charge of its batteries. And this was from a project that I put together about two years ago, so these are charge curves that are two years old, but the main point is there’s a lot of diversity in charge curves and they all decline as you increase.

[Slide #30 – The Fast in Fast Charging ] And it becomes even more stark and apparent when you look at power versus time connected to a fast charger. And again, these are curves where the charger is rated at 350 kilowatts or above, and what’s limiting this is the vehicle’s ability to charge. And so, this is really helpful when thinking about, from a utility perspective, what upstream infrastructure am I really going to need? If someone builds 10 350 kilowatt chargers, are they really going to need 3,500 kilowatts of upstream distribution capacity?

[Slide #31 – Avoiding the Spike] And the answer is probably not, but that depends on if all of these vehicles are plugging in at exactly the same time at zero state of charge, or if they’re staggered and they’re coming in at different states of charge. And so, really what we’re getting to is what is the peak demand on your site? And on the left, if you’re staggering these vehicles coming in throughout an hour in the morning, you get a peak demand of about 250 kilowatts versus if there was a queue waiting for it to open and everyone comes in and charges, now you’re at 550.

And if you think back to demand charges being a pretty big component of operating costs, this demand charge is going to be three or four times higher in one scenario versus the other.

[Slide #32 – Actual Vehicle Charging Curves] So what we did is model using the actual load curves of vehicles, what it would look like if you had a site with 6 350-kilowatt DC fast charging. The scenario I defined here was a rural summer holiday, just means a very busy day where the chargers are used a lot. And to be clear, the charge curves individually are real data, but the overarching load profile is constructed, is not an actual load profile. And so, this is what happens with the actual charging curves of vehicles.

[Slide #33 – Simulated Flat 150kW] But I wanted to show what happens if vehicles could actually charge at a flat 150 kilowatts. And so, what this means is as battery technology gets better and say when you’re connected you can charge at 150 the whole time, the charge curve looks different and now we have a much higher peak.

[Slide 34 – Simulated Flat 350kW] And this is what happens now if a vehicle could take 350 kilowatts. And so, the point I’m trying to make here is going back to where we are today, you don’t need to have the full capacity to serve 1800 kilowatts on this site because vehicles can’t accept it, but when we get to better technology, if that comes, we will need to plan for being able to supply all of that capacity.

[Slide #35 – 50 kw DCFC Plaza] And I’m going to walk through a similar concept here. This is what happens if your vehicle comes and you’re charging on a 50 kilowatt charger. So, you have ten 50 kilowatt chargers and your vehicles are charging, you reach your nameplate capacity because every vehicle can accept 50 kilowatts.

Editor’s Note – Nameplate capacity is also known as rated capacity, refers to the maximum theoretical output of a facility, such as a power plant or generator, under ideal conditions. It’s the intended full-load, sustained output. This value is often used for classifying the power output of a facility and is typically expressed in megawatts (MW).

[Slide #36 – 75 kw DCFC Plaza] And so, now if you then jump to 75 kilowatts, again, so this is moving from chargers that are constraining it, to say you could dispense 75 kilowatts per charger, your load profile jumped.

[Slide #37 – 150 kw DCFC Plaza] And then, when you go from 75 kilowatts for the charger to 150, there’s not that big of a difference in the load profile.

[Slide #38 – 350 kw DCFC Plaza] And then lastly, if you were to offer all 350 kilowatts, there’s almost an imperceivable difference in the load shape. And so, really all I’m trying to show here today is anything beyond 150 kilowatts isn’t going to change your customer’s experience much and isn’t going to have that much of an impact on the upstream distribution infrastructure. But of course, this is not static. As new vehicle models come out with higher charging capacities over a longer state of charge, this is going to change.

[Slide #39 – DCFC Load Profile Shift with Power Capacity] So, that is all of the slides that I had. I know I covered a wide range of topics and considerations, but I thought it would be helpful as we went into this conversation.

[Slide #40 – Questions?] And now I would be happy to take questions. Okay, Jay, I saw your hand go up.

Jay Smith:

I don’t know if Chris wanted to go first since he had an earlier question, but I’ll go ahead and jump in. And it’s related to the charts you had at the end.

Mike Austin:

Also, just to jump in. I’m going to hand it over to Nathan to moderate this part. It sounds like, I mean, everyone’s pretty good at handling it and taking turns, but you’ll be hearing more from him now.

Nathan Niese:

Yeah, jump right in, Jay. Over to you.

Jay Smith:

Pricing Utilities Okay. The demand charge. Do you see a transition to more of a volumetric rate rather than the demand charge rate? I mean, you talk about that being such a big factor in if you have everybody coming in queued up at the same time, your peak demand could be five times or even greater depending on what the situation is. But how do you see us transition away from demand? Because I think going to more volumetric is truer and probably going to be easier for retailers and folks to manage their electric bills if it’s more based on volume, because that you can pass on to the user. Whereas the demand chart, you don’t know what that is until the end of the month when you get the bill.

Garrett Fitzgerald:

Yes, and I mean, it’s been a point of discussion for over a decade, and some of the California IOUs had tested different approaches to still capturing the cost of service of being able to supply that demand, but five years ago the conversation was, “Well, as utilization increases, that effect of demand charge will be less significant on your business and we’ll be okay.” So, what we’ll do is we’ll have what’s called a demand charge holiday to say for the first five years, but in reality I think we’re experiencing utilization sweet spot maybe is 30 to 40%, and you can’t get much beyond that before you probably need to build more charging infrastructure because people are waiting in line. And so, I don’t know that the demand charge holiday approach is going to continue. I can tell you that I don’t think it’s fair to say we will, as a nation, move away from demand charges.

There are 3,300 utilities out there and they’re all setting their own rate structures, and I don’t see a major trend or really any trend of pushing away from demand charges. One thing that is happening is utilities are getting approval to spend funds on make-ready infrastructure that covers the cost of bringing that site up to the capacity that it needs. Historically that would’ve been borne by the customer, but unable to cover some of the future costs that they’ll get from demand charges, that infrastructure is now paid for by the utility. So, I think what we are actually seeing a lot more of is more managed charging or curtailing, particularly if you’re a commercial fleet and may have that flexibility. I know you might not be able to pass curtailment onto a public fast charger. And on site storage and generation. So, I think a combination of that, and maybe there’ll be some pulling back from the magnitude of demand charges shifting to more volumetric, but I don’t see that as something that’s going to be the overall solution.

Nathan Niese:

One thing I might suggest just in terms of how to manage the conversation, because it might often lead to follow-on conversations or another input from the rest of the group versus just Q&A only to Garrett, is use one of the reaction buttons, not your hand up but a reaction button if you’d like to jump in and build off of what was just said. Otherwise, I’ll go to the next person who’s raised their hand, which is likely to then lead to a different question and maybe take us in a different path, if that works. Okay, so Darren, did you want to respond then? Is that thumbs up in terms of the question that was just outlined?

Darren Palmer:

Yes. So, on the demand charges, we are putting in a network at the moment in the dealerships to expand the network to get more availability in all areas of the country, and we’re getting first feedback from them on demand charges. So, even if their charge is not used that often, just one time in a month can really trigger that demand charge. So, it seems that those demand charges were made in a different era for a different reason. And so, if they stay that way, and as you correctly mentioned the providers are unlikely to change it, we’re going to see more management then.

Our users are going to say, “Hey, I need to manage this. I need to know what’s coming at me. I’m not going to allow multi-stalls to add up and take me over that demand charge, and incur that charge not knowing how much revenue I’ll get back.” So, we’ll see management of that which ultimately will feed through to customers experience, because they have too many people at once and it will create a demand charge, they’ll start restricting. So, if we don’t see any updates to that I think it could start to affect the experience people have.

Garrett Fitzgerald:

Yes. I mean, I guess my reaction too is that’s where we get willingness to pay. If we have customers who want 500 kilowatts charging, we can do that as an industry but it’s going to cost a lot of money to do that. And so, we going to find would you rather stay another 30 minutes or would you rather pay three times as much for that product? And I think there’ll be customers willing to pay and others who are not, and I guess it’s the business model operator’s choice of what are you going to offer and are you going to use batteries to offset that?

Darren Palmer:

That’s a great point. I don’t think I’ve seen that anywhere in the world yet. You mentioned other countries that are ahead, and we could see how they’ve evolved to see how it may affect us. I haven’t seen that yet, it’s a very good point. It’s a premium service and the user could choose. Have you seen that anywhere else in the world yet?

Garrett Fitzgerald:

I have not. And perhaps the reason I’ve heard that is it’s a complicated model that’s hard to communicate to the customer, and right now folks are just getting comfortable driving their EV and charging, but I haven’t seen it. I suspect we will.

Nathan Niese:

Roy, you had put a thumbs up, and then we’ll get to you, Chris, and any other questions.

Roy Strasburger:

Strategy Thank you Nathan, and great presentation, Garrett. Thank you very much. There’s a lot of information in there. On the demand charge, if I understand correctly, the demand charge was a disincentive for people to overload the system or to try to pull too much power at any specific given time. Do you think that the continued existence of the demand charge, similar to what Darren was saying, is going to push retailers and are endpoint charging units going to do more storage offline at the premises? Are we going to see more battery storage or alternative storage at the point of charging as opposed to being connected to the actual transmission lines?

Garrett Fitzgerald:

Pricing Utilities Yes. So, I think my first comment is demand charges aren’t designed to disincentivize anything, really what they’re designed is to make sure that a utility can recover the cost required to build the infrastructure. And if you want to use five megawatts, they have to build up that street infrastructure. And so, that’s really where they came from. It wasn’t a disincentive so much as it costs us per kilowatt-hour to generate electricity from the generators, and there’s a different set of costs required to invest in the wires to bring that to you. And so, the distribution component of a cost of service is in the demand charge. The reason that it hasn’t existed for residential customers has a little bit more to do with equitable pricing across the whole customer class, and potentially resulting in big volatility in pricing. But to answer your question, yes, I think absolutely you’re already seeing on-site storage in solar and other generations in charge management.

One thing that hasn’t come up yet here is more of the conversation that I hear around is if there’s a fleet that wants to build their charging depot, the timelines to build that is now two, three or four years, it will get worse with transformers not being able to be imported cost-effectively from China. So now folks are saying, “Hey, I’ll take whatever capacity I can get from the utility and then I’ll use storage to supplement what I can’t get.” So, I think for a variety of reasons you’re seeing more on-site, and you’ll probably see more as costs of batteries continue to come down.

Nathan Niese:

Over to you, Chris.

Chris Normandeau:

Yes, I guess Jay may have hopped off there, but just a comment on the demand charges. I’m surprised by the question. We see the opposite. Most consumers are moving more towards working with utilities and those utilities moving more towards demand charges as opposed to away from them. To your point, Garrett, it’s internalizing the costs that the utilities are incurring, and it’s just becoming more and more a reality for smaller and smaller consumers. So, I’d be surprised if it moves away from it at all.

That being said, Garrett, when I’m listening to your presentation I’m realizing the number of players involved in what you’re discussing. So at the end of the day, getting towards some sort of a higher level of load sharing or active load management seems like what you’re pointing the arrow towards the path that’s least resistance. But at the same time, to your point, there’s 33,000 utilities in the country and however many sectors of utilities throughout different regions in the country. How do you see the least friction path of implementing easier charging with that many players in the world? I mean, you hear about the power plants and the virtual power plants, this, that, the other, but at the end of the day we’re talking years of planning for anything that’s this significant in demand.

Garrett Fitzgerald:

Yes. So, I think that the simple answer is it’s probably not going to be seamless and painless to build out this infrastructure. And I don’t see a solution to normalizing anything across the 3,300 utilities for so many reasons. There are 50 states that all have their own way of regulating the utilities, and some of them are appointed by political appointees. And so, there’s a little bit of politics involved in what regulators are prioritizing. And then you have the IOUs versus the munis versus the coops.

And so, I think the reality is if you’re an actor in this space, you have to get savvy at working with different utilities and speaking their language, and coming in and say, “Hey, I recognize this is the world that you’re operating within, and how can I do that?” Now, that’s painful if you’re Ford and you’re trying to sell [Ford F-150] Lightnings that are bidirectional and now your customers are asking you, “Well, how do I do this?” Ford doesn’t know how to do that for 3,300 utilities. They’re trying. So, I think it is just fundamentally going to be complicated. And then, you had a second part of that question.

Editor’s Note – Bi-directional power flow harnesses the truck’s stored battery power to help power your home when a Charge Station Pro is installed with the Home Integration System. In general, a bidirectional power supply is a sophisticated device capable of both sourcing power and sinking power from a load.

Chris Normandeau:

Yes, I guess the other piece is the system you’re describing is a more complicated, larger scale version of multifamily housing. You’ve got a lot of different players and some sort of, to Roy’s point, on-site storage, or on-site generation, or virtual power plant could help lessen demand impact. And then, to Jay’s point earlier, real-time pricing of on-peak versus off-peak can also incentivize charging on-site, but what players are you seeing out there that have the ability to load share or load shed at that level? I mean, you mentioned the Lightning, but that’s one or three EVs in the U.S. that have that type of capability?

Garrett Fitzgerald:

I think there’s a couple of things to unpack here, and maybe we can have a conversation because this group probably has a perspective. The willingness of a customer to be curtailed is important, right? So if you’re coming for a fast charger and you need it right then, you may not take an incentive or a price signal to get a lower one unless the charge point operator determines that’s how they’re going to do it. I haven’t seen a whole lot of that curtailment or throttling, a little bit. But in terms of the virtual power plants and the management, I don’t think utilities or others are looking to public fast charging as a source of flexibility. It doesn’t seem the conversation is going there. If you’re a fleet and you have some control and you’re really maximizing your operations, all of them are moving towards charge management.

And in some cases they’re required because the utility now has a new concept called a flexible interconnection. Where if you need five megawatts and they only have four megawatts, they can say, well, we will allow you to connect your demand for five megawatts as long as for the next two years you make sure you keep it below four megawatts while we build out the infrastructure to do that. So they’re all using charge management. But to answer your question where we are seeing it, I think you see it in the cabinet power sharing where you might have a 350 kilowatt so called cabinet that has two dispensers out of it. And if I come in, and I’m the only one charged, I can get 350 kilowatts. But if two plug in, then that is being power shared between the two cars. And there are a lot of operators that are doing that now as sort of a means to say we can offer 350 kilowatts, but it will be shared with other customers. And usually it’s not a bad experience because so few cars can even take that 350 kilowatts.

Nathan Niese:

Darren, I saw your couple thumbs up. Do you want to build on that? And Gabe, I haven’t forgotten about your hand up and we’ll get there.

Darren Palmer:

Yes, reading your last report, a piece of information data for you that I can share. Based on our connected data, 80% or more of our customers are charging at home in their usage. And that’s after quite a few number of years of usage of our vehicles. So that’s slightly up from the data you were showing last time.

Strategy Also, we have, as you know, facility for bidirectional charging. But a point of view here, for example, we have 19 kilowatt charging on the Lightning. But think of it this way, if you’re charging at 19 kilowatt, you get stage one, you could take that down. Let’s say the street is becoming overloaded and the provider knows that step one, they could take it down from 19 to 7, step one. Step two, they could take it all the way to zero, just stop your charging for a few hours. And then the final stage we can actually pump 10 kilowatt back into the house.

So if the house is using up to 10, we can take the house down to zero. It’s probably at night and they’re probably not using 10. So whatever they’re using, you could take off the grid. But the quick value is either slow them down a little bit or switch them off. I mean, you get a huge value for that. We also looked at feeding back up to the grid. How much use is that? But that’s a lot of extra difficulty for the extra benefit. I mean, we calculate a lot of streets could be kept under the limit for a long time just by managing that. And our first-generation system needs more installation. But I think everybody’s working on bidirectional systems that are much less installation in the next generation. So where the car gives out AC and the AC can be matched up, it doesn’t need an inverter in the home. So I think a lot of people are working on those as we are, so later on the person gets home back up and they also get bidirectional for the house at lower cost in the next generation.

Garrett Fitzgerald:

Yes. Well, just to clarify everything that I was talking about on this limited flexibility was in the public context. There are a lot of utilities implementing pretty big programs that are doing smart charge management at the residential level and optimizing for distribution overloading. So that is a little bit further advanced and that is very much going to be required to ensure that we don’t have to build out far more than we need to. And if anybody wants, I don’t know, Darren, if you saw, SEPA has a number of reports on that. We have the “State of Managed Charging” and the “State of Bidirectional Charging.” They’re free and they’re public. And they sort of talk about all of these in great detail for residential charging.

Nathan Niese:

Thanks for your patience, Gabe. Maybe you want to take us in a different direction?

Gabe Klein:

EV Charging Yes. Thank you. Well first of all, Garrett, thanks for that awesome presentation. I was thinking to myself, I wish somebody had given me that before I started the Joint Office because I would’ve known a lot more coming in, particularly on the energy front. It was really, really great and I took a lot of notes. But you made a really good point I think at your opening, which is the charging is going to mostly integrate into your life versus altering your behavior. And I feel like one of my frustrations over the last years as a consumer also that has had an EV since early 2018, is that I’ve only probably charged at a DC fast charger 20 times in maybe seven or eight years. And every time I go to the beach or go on a road trip, I stop once.

And I do think we’re actually on track. We’re on track in our building. Our numbers showed that at the Joint Office. Now are all the DC fast chargers where you want them? Not always. We need a lot more on the highways at those convenience stores, right? The biggest challenge is reliability. And that’s something people don’t want to talk about as much. That’s why we started the ChargeX Consortium. We had Ford there and GM, we had a hundred companies working on reliability of the existing system, parts of which don’t work 35% of the time. That’s a real challenge. So that’s point one. I would like to think the ChargeX Consortium had a larger impact. I talked to one of the largest manufacturers of DC fast chargers who said after going through that experience, we’ve recreated our DC fast chargers, made them modular, replaceable parts, they’re going to be much more reliable. Because we said you have to be 97% uptime if you want to accept federal money. So I do think the newer hardware is going to be considerably better.

Point two is that I do think the press has sort of scared people over the last few years. Some of it is the reality of the lack of reliability in the system. Some of it is that the average American hasn’t owned an electric car and so they’re still in this paradigm of “I go to the gas station once a week.” And the reality is you don’t if you have a charger. And I have friends that just charge on a 110 outlet because they drive so little. The majority of America is pretty urbanized. We’re urbanizing faster worldwide and in the US.

If you look at TripLinx, 2% of trips are greater than 50 miles in the United States. 52% are less than 3 miles. And so there is this paradigm shift meets the fear factor of the 1.6 times a year, I’m taking a road trip, I don’t want to be in trouble. And I get that. And Americans maybe don’t want to be told this, but we don’t really have a problem. It was interesting looking at your chart, which showed Norway with a smaller vehicle to charger ratio than we have in the U.S. Interesting. Number one sales in the world for EVs. So reliability, huge issue. We need more DC fast chargers in the right places. The majority of the chargers are going to be level two chargers and even level one smart chargers in the U.S., like 95%.

Garrett Fitzgerald:

Yes. Let me pick on another point. So I agree. I think what the challenge is, if you want to operate DC fast chargers commercially is we do need them there. And as you mentioned, once you find out that you can plug in at home or at work, you would much rather do that. It’s also cheaper, right? If you’re paying 10 cents a kilowatt hour or you’re in an off peak rate, that’s up to 10 times cheaper than a DC fast charger. So folks are going to find that. But the issue is we need to have all of that DC fast charging out there for when you do need it those 1% of times. And presumably maybe the solution is if you transition from gas to electric, you’re already saving 70% on fuel. And if you’re doing at home charging all off peak, you’re saving even more. So are folks going to have to be willing to pay 10 times more for those fast charging when they need it a couple times a year?

That may be the case. But then there’s the whole issue of sort of equity. And if you are someone who lives in a multi-unit dwelling and only has access to public charging, you cannot afford to pay 10x for that. And so we have to find a way to serve everyone if we want everyone in society to evolve. So yeah, I think you make some really great points and I think it’s just going to be hard to build and operate charging in the transition. It has been. And perhaps that is why reliability has been an issue is sites aren’t all that profitable. So having all that money to go fix a site that’s not getting used is tricky.

Nathan Niese:

Gabe, I saw you thumbs up. And then Darren, it seems as well. So Gabe first.

Gabe Klein:

One thing I forgot to mention in my little diatribe is that what we’re really missing in this country, and I expressed a lot in my prior position to the White House and others. We’re missing the ubiquity of L2 chargers that we need. That’s really what we’re missing. Now I understand for the purposes of this meeting and everything, we’re really focused on DC fast charging, but there’s been so much pressure put on that part of the market. When you go to Europe, you see plugs all over the streets. You see street light poles lit up for charging. Sometimes it’s slow, it’s like 3 kilowatt. But to your chart that showed cars sitting 95% of the time, who cares how fast it’s, it doesn’t matter. You’re parked all night.

So I think we put so much pressure on DC fast chargers. Some rightfully so. Some maybe we’ve over indexed. And I will admit at the federal level, we didn’t put enough emphasis on low-speed public charging, city streets, municipal garages, and so forth. We need a balanced system. And you expressed very clearly, Garrett, that it’s that 350 kilowatt to megawatt charging that’s going to take the power of an entire town in a convenience store. So we can’t put all that pressure on the DC fast charging system. I’ll pause there.

Garrett Fitzgerald:

Yes, I mean I just 100% agree that level two charging and level one play a huge role. If you think about it, we are sort of blessed in the situation that we have because imagine anytime you park, you probably look around and there’s power. There’s infrastructure within a hundred feet already. So we have this massive network built out. We just have to do that last connection. And like you said, who cares if it’s 1 kilowatt because you just took 2 seconds to plug it in and maybe it takes 20 hours to charge, but you’re not doing anything, you’re out doing your life.

Gabe Klein:

Exactly. Well said.

Nathan Niese:

Over to you, Darren, and then I’ll be patient on my question.

Darren Palmer:

I really agree with Gabe’s point about the readiness of these products for people’s lives. We say with the 80% plus at home and a lot of vehicles over 300 miles, they’re really ready for their life now. Imagine the number of people who can use as a second car, a vehicle that charges at home has 300 miles. It really would fit many, many people’s lives. A lot more than currently have bought one. And as we look into why don’t people invest, there’s some reasons. Affordability of the vehicles. However, we’ve seen a lot of really great deals recently across all the competitors. So you can no longer just say its price because it’s really sitting there within gas car pricing. So it is really, they’re waiting to be ready when it’s right for them. I think customers learning about how good it can be in your life. If you have that, it’s always ready. It’s always at the right temperature and it’s full every morning.

I mean, they’re not realizing that benefit because they focus on this trip and it won’t work on a trip. And they also don’t really know that those trips, say 500 miles, you stop for 20 minutes and you have to stop anyway for comfort, get a coffee and a doughnut. By the time you’re out, it’s charged. People who own them already know this and that’s what we see. We’re seeing really high satisfaction percentage of people owning these cars. So once they own one, they tell everybody, tell 10 people, but it’ll take years and years with the replace cycle. It will take years to get across the country, but it will come gradually.

I want to pick up on one, you said reliability. So we started tracking reliability way back in COVID, and Bill is here with me. He’s pioneered a lot of it for us. We saw reliability. The number of people who got a charge was lower then, and it’s incredibly damaging. If you go somewhere and you don’t get a charge, you usually by that point you need it. It will make you a very memorable experience for somebody they won’t forget. We are now up above 97 to 98%. So almost everybody. And this is data tracked and we’ve had a lot of help from the network providers. Nearly everybody gets a charge now and we’re delighted about that. That is great. However, they don’t all get a charge at full speed. And a lot of customers don’t understand this. And if that happens, a charging station is running, for example, a third, when the customer arrives, there’s a queue. Because instead of it taking 20 minutes, it’s taking an hour and that forms a queue. Then the next customer comes and they get it.

And I’ve spoken to many of the customers at these stations, I find an excuse and manage to speak to them. And most of them don’t understand what rate it’s supposed to be charging at and that they’re getting a third of that rate. They don’t understand. And so that’s really important. I think the industry can do more to shine a light on where the customer’s not getting the rate that they’re supposed to in their vehicle and therefore has increased charging from 20 minutes to an hour. That is incredibly damaging. Many of them, it’s a new experience. They don’t even know what they’re supposed to get. They know what it said when they bought the car, but it’s hard for them to relate why they’re not getting that experience.

And usually one or more plugs at the site are working at the full rate, but the plug you are on isn’t. Experienced users will replug where they can, but new users, I’ve noticed they don’t tend to. So reliability is something that I think the industry needs to work on. And with better data, we should be able to do that and make the same improvement we’ve seen on ultimately getting a charge at each site.

Garrett Fitzgerald:

Yes, I just want to pick up on two things because I’m pretty passionate about them as well. One, you talked about folks thinking they need the gas station experience for all charging. But if you pivoted it and said, if you had a gas dispenser at home, would you ever go to a gas station and by the way it was a dollar a gallon? They’d probably say, of course not. Why would I do that? So some very slight pivots and sort of how you think about things can be helpful. And then it is unfortunate, because if you talk to any non-EV owner, their brain is really good at saying why it won’t work. “Well, it won’t work for me because five years ago I towed a boat, and I would’ve needed 500 miles of range.” And you’re like, “Well, do you even own a boat?” “No.”

So people think about the reason it wouldn’t work for anyone. And I think we have to, like you said, focus on it will work for a lot of people today, and how do we get them in an EV? This happened to me. I’m looking for a new electric pickup that’s going to be able to tow and move stuff to some rural land. And I looked at the vehicles and they weren’t quite ready for what I needed. So I’m like, that’s fine. I’m not going to force it. There are plenty of people that are ready. I agree.

Nathan Niese:

This might be the opportunity where I get my question here just because building off of all this really great conversation where you have OEM, utility, government all talking about combinations of awareness, reliability and then even data access to get past the feelings of the vibes that I saw in the chat part written. So my question to the group is, do we think we’re getting closer to this available data set that’s able to layer on things that say my particular use case is Nathan living in Chicago, who bought that [Mustang] Mach E and currently has 110 volt and doesn’t put an L2 charger in who drives off into Michigan and Ohio to visit his family.

I’m on the right next buyer of an EV versus the person down the street who maybe has a different set of use cases and drives to work every day versus the person who lives in Maryland versus who lives in Nevada. How close can we get to start at a block by block or person by person use case? Be able to say at the dealership, I now have information to know if this use case and where we’re at today with the available charging infrastructure and the future charging infrastructure, if we know where utilities are going and the charge point operators are going, helps me believe that I can purchase that EV. I would welcome thoughts.

Gabe Klein:

I don’t think we have that.

Nathan Niese:

Is it possible?

Gabe Klein:

Yes. Our EV working group…one of the things that we came up with – this is at the federal level – we had a lot of great folks on there like John Bozzella [president and CEO at Alliance for Automotive Innovation] and a lot of really smart people. And we need a public education campaign. We absolutely need that so people understand how this all works. And I think your point is that we have data. Google, a week ago released Google Research, has all these new AI based products that will tell you exactly what’s happening either historically or in real time on city streets. So yeah, absolutely we should be able to project based on people’s existing or planned future behavior. Even how many times they would need to go to an EV fast charger in a year, which may be once or twice depending on where they live and how they travel.

One other thing is that somebody mentioned earlier, I think it was Garrett, that state by state, things are very different. One of the reasons we saw slow uptake in terms of EV chargers rolling out, although some of it was just based on transformer delays and so on and so forth, there are a bunch of states that just didn’t do anything. They had no interest in this, right? For political reasons, populist political reasons and so forth. I’m not going to name the states, but I think you can guess and it’s a lot of them. So if you view this as a utility that everybody needs to have access to, again, to Garrett’s point, that’s the purpose of the utilities, to make sure everybody has access. Or if you view this through a political lens, you get to very different answers, different coverage, so on and so forth. And unfortunately, EVs have been politicized. I think that’s changing. Maybe we can thank Elon Musk for that, sort of balancing that a bit. But anyway, I will pause there, pause my comments before I get myself in trouble.

Roy Strasburger:

Well, I’m going to jump in for just a second because, Gabe, I want to pull your conversation out of the chat and put it into the conversation for a couple of reasons. One, I think it’s a really good starting point for something and, two, so we can get into the transcript. You made the comment, and then Chris followed it up, that what we have is an EV education gap. And you alluded to that a little at the beginning of this last discussion, but do you want to go into that a little bit more? And Chris, I’d love for you to expand upon your “vibe” comment.

Gabe Klein:

Marketing Communications I’ll try to be brief. The majority of Americans do not understand that you can charge at home because they haven’t owned an EV or they may not even know somebody that has an EV yet. Now, on the other side of the coin, there are people that live in multi-family homes more and more, and the second, third wave of EV buyers are often in condominiums or apartments. And we need to get many more chargers into those facilities. And that is happening. And there’s actually a lot of businesses that are building on the back of multi-unit. But basically with all the misinformation out there, and again, I would fault us at the federal level, I fault some of the states and even cities for not being clear on what you really need, what the timeline is, how EVs work and so on and so forth.

But we know now enough that we should be able to do a public education campaign. And not to put too much pressure on Darren and others, but the OEMs could be intimately involved in this. They could help fund it. And that was one of the outcomes from the EV working group, is that we felt that through the Alliance for Automotive Innovation and through the OEMs and with some partnership from us at the federal level — it doesn’t have to be — that we need to do that. It needs to happen because if people don’t understand something, if people think that there’s a barrier because people go to no much easier than they go, yes, we’ve got to overcome that. I could see a series where we do have a day in the life of an EV owner. Just show us how effortless it is. There’s really nothing to it. I plug my car in once a week at night, and that’s it. And my electric bill hasn’t even gone up. I got 9 solar panels, put in a charger, my electric bill went down when I got an EV. But we don’t tell people this.

Roy Strasburger:

And Chris, what about your “vibes” idea?

Chris Normandeau:

Yes, so I agree with Gabe in that there is an education gap. I spend every day of the week talking with condo boards about EV charging in their multifamily homes, and there’s a lot of education piece in it. That being said, at the end of the day, behavior is the hardest thing to change. If not, then a 99 cent light switch would never be replaced with a hundred dollars occupancy sensor. And that’s just a thing to shut the lights off in a room when somebody leaves it. So at the end of the day, I do think that as momentum grows, people start to understand more from your point, Gabe, yes, an education piece. But more so when something is less scary or less unknown, they’re going to be more likely to feel more receptive to change. And when you see stories in the news about EV growth slowing, it’s still a drastically growing industry regardless of what’s going on anywhere in any sector of the U.S. economy. So yes, I guess that’s kind of where my mind goes.

Nathan Niese:

Sophia, I saw you have your hand up and a thumbs up.

Sophia Schuster:

Yes, and I’m sorry I’m not on camera. We had a really bad windstorm here last night, so I’m operating off of data. And so the camera will not be supported today. But I really appreciated what you were saying, Gabe, that it’s not just about the states and the cities who need to do a lot of education, but also the OEMs. And I just kind of anecdotally want to add in that the dealers have a huge role to play. I actually just transitioned to an EV, so I’m really thrilled about that. But my buying experience wasn’t the greatest because the guy who was selling me my car didn’t actually know about my car. I asked him questions and fortunately, in the role that I’m in, I kind of already knew the answers. So I was doing a little bit of background research.

I can imagine that if it were any other customer who doesn’t know, who is afraid, who is nervous about this transition, that it could have absolutely led to them returning that car. So I guess I just wanted to kind of plus up the whole education component because the dealers, a lot of Americans still really depend on the dealers to provide accurate information, and if the salespeople can’t do that, we have a huge problem.

Nathan Niese:

That’s still where my question on the data stemmed from. If you could, at the point of sale, for someone considering an EV be able to have more data about it fitting their use case and broader awareness, it would seem to be much more helpful. Go to you, Mike.

Mike Austin:

Thanks. I just wanted to add to this on the thought of, I don’t think it’s conscious, and I don’t think it’s a barrier, but similar to the idea that dealers and automakers have an incentive to sell more expensive cars. They don’t really want to say, “Hey, you don’t need all the capacity. You can buy this cheaper car.” There is a little bit of a catch twenty two where you’re saying, “Hey, you don’t really drive that much, so you don’t need a lot of charging.” Like I said, I don’t think that’s a conscious effort or any resistance, but it is kind of funny that automakers really don’t want to say, “Do you know what, we’re going to give you 150-mile or a 50-mile car.” And that’s been proven in the market that people don’t want it. But again, it’s a messaging pattern.

But I think on a more optimistic side, even taking bicycling infrastructure as an example of people saying, “Oh, I can’t use a bicycle to get around town. I can’t have an EV.” Once the infrastructure’s in place and you see it, like dedicated bike lanes, if you see charging everywhere, then that probably helps shift the perception. But I agree wholeheartedly that it is an education and a vibe problem to solve.

Nathan Niese:

Over to you, Darren.

Myra Kressner:

Gabe, did you just put something in the chat?

Gabe Klein:

Oh, yes. Sorry. I’m such a chatter. I love to put things in the chat when I think of something. So Jeff Bezos is backing this new company Slate, which if you reverse the letters, you can get Tesla, which is sort of funny. But anyway, they announced this last week and it’s a 150 mile per hour pickup, $25,000 with incentives, about $20,000 crank windows. Not a lot of bells and whistles, 150 miles. And so it’s going to be interesting. I think Mike’s absolutely right about, I mean, I have a car with 300 miles to charge, and that’s the minimum I would think about. And I’m pretty educated on the topic. But with more ubiquitous charging, if you do the majority of your travel locally, if it is your second vehicle, we will see. As Jim Farley (CEO Ford) has, I think said, we’ll see lower cost vehicles with smaller batteries. It just makes more financial sense over time.

Nathan Niese:

Over to you, Darren. GM was just mentioned, so feel like you deserve the next follow up on that one.

Darren Palmer:

Yes, so the whole dealer education thing and making sure that it’s clean and clear for customers that come in, we’ve been working on for years now. We’ve taken 6,000, 7,000 dealers, salesmen and persons through our university to do that. To be able to educate them to get ready for that. We do find customers come in, they tend to have a high level of knowledge when they’re looking for EVs. Not so many come in looking for anything, and they’re completely open and they get sold on EV. That’s just happening as much as you would think. And people always go to the worry, they always go to that, “It’s going to take me longer to fill up and I’ll have to stop on my journeys.” Almost exclusively, once they move they say, “Why didn’t I do it earlier?” And, “I never want to go back.” We see it again and again.

And it will slowly grow through the country as one person tells another and each one tends to tell their friends. If somebody has an EV and is having a dinner party, they are going to be talking about EVs at some point in the dinner party. I’ve been told by my wife, I’m not allowed to talk about them and then people start begging me. “Oh, let him talk about it!” Because they’re excited about it.

So that will happen, but it will take years. It took 10 years for the smartphone, like an iPhone, to go from small and specific groups to everybody. 10 years. And there’s a year replacement cycle. So if you try and run that out, how long is it going to take for it to be organic growth across the country? Could take 30 years. So that education thing is absolutely spot on. We’ve concentrated on just clearing barriers away. Just keep taking the excuses away until there’s no more left. Then more people will buy them and they’ll tell their friends.

So we’ve started the “Power Promise” where we give them the charger at home and then we had to work out how to install it for them too. You can’t just give it to them, you have to install it. So we’ve been doing that and that seems to be working quite well. Each person seems delighted with that and then they tell more people. But that’s going to take a long time. And that is with cars that already go over 300 miles.

Customer Behavior We know the 90 percentile of usage in this country is 100 miles a week. We’ve got that. We’ve got the data for that. 100 miles a week. So 300 will get you three weeks. Still people want the 600 mile car and they want it to be refilled in five minutes. That’s human beings saying, “I want something just like today. I don’t want to have to think about it.”

So one thing I personally have thought about is they want to see these chargers everywhere. One problem is are they going to use them enough? I wondered if gas stations would start to install them, one at a gas station. And we know, I’ve seen some early usage where customers stay longer and they spend more. And I wondered if it would start rolling out across the country where people put chargers into gas stations and then people see them and when they see them they know, “They’re everywhere. I can just drive till I need a charge, then I’m going to stop at the nearest gas station and I’ll know there’ll be one.”

That’s how they drive gas. They just drive until they have to [stop]. Even though they can plan on the computer and the computer will tell them where the station is. Yeah, that’s not enough for them. It’s a barrier. And I’ve seen some early examples of this like BP in the UK, they started putting them into stations and they had quite a lot of success with that. The customer was spending more and staying longer. And so I wondered if that’s where the direction it might move in as well at some point in this country.

Eva Strasburger:

Roy or Robert, as retailers do you want to address that with what’s happening in the c-store? Because that’s such a major topic of conversation.

Roy Strasburger:

I think that’s a great question for Tom, too.

Eva Strasburger:

Yes.

Robert Hampton:

I think that’s a great point. I live in Idaho. I worked for Jacksons Food Stores for over nine years. And I forget if it was Gabe’s or whose point it was earlier, but there were certain states where chargers just weren’t being installed, and mostly I think Idaho was one of those states. But now, I keep up with Jacksons quite a bit and they’ve got an initiative to roll out EV charging.

So I think in terms of the convenience stores, we’re seeing more and more of that, especially on highways and areas that just make sense. Part of the issue, though, is some of the legacy stations, and I’m not just speaking about Jacksons, but any legacy station, in order to retrofit to bring in the power and to install these chargers, first you’ve got to have the infrastructure, the power available.

And secondly, a lot of times it’s going to require breaking the concrete and that can be an issue if you break the concrete anywhere around where the tanks are on the ground, that might open you up to having to do soil testing and things like that, so there is some apprehension of doing that. But any kind of new build out an NTI location, absolutely people are putting in the infrastructure now.

Myra Kressner:

Okay, yes, Tom?

Tom Healey:

I will say, listening to the whole conversation today, extremely educational for me. Not a lot of surprises. We are facing the same challenge Robert was just mentioning about trying to basically future-proof and deal with existing legacy sites.

And I brought this up on past conversations about just the limited space at a lot of our older locations and we’re trying to make that transition from serving our customers as they migrate over to electric vehicles. You know, how to plan out the site construction and how to deal with existing older facilities and dedicate space to EV charging.

I’m sorry I missed an earlier part of that. So there may have been some other discussion that I could add more context to.

Myra Kressner:

Well, yes, because Darren was talking about if there’s the ubiquity of charging sites at the gas stations in U.S. similar to how that has been driven in other parts of the world, and he gave BP U.K. as an example. And so that’s what led us to say, “Oh, okay. Tom, did you have an opinion on that?”

Tom Healey:

Well, I also understand that as the adoption rate continues to increase and there’s a higher percentage of EVs on the road, that means less traffic to our facilities because of the fact that, yes, 80% of people are charging at home. So the need for that DCFC charger is not going to be as high a frequency as the motor fuel pumps that we have at our sites.

So we’re just in a position we’re trying to adapt and find that market share that we can serve and we understand that’s probably lower volume DCFC. When I say lower volume, I mean lower volume of customers. There’s also a resistance from customers when they don’t understand the costs involved with us doing this type of infrastructure build out and how we need to recoup those costs.

So the grant funding has been instrumental in us being able to even capitalize these projects, but to try to recoup and make it a profitable business model and charge at a certain rate per kilowatt-hour, customers, just a lot of them, are used to free charging at this point. And so if we’re going to try to charge that premium that was discussed earlier where, okay, are they willing to pay three times the rate that they would if they were just charging at home because of the convenience of a much faster charge? There’s just not a customer acceptance of that right now to raise up that rate per kilowatt-hour.

Nathan Niese:

Maybe we’ll go over to Garrett for a question or a comment and then see if we can pull in folks like Deb or Francisco who haven’t spoken up based on what Garrett you shared here.

Garrett Fitzgerald:

Sure. I’m going to bring us way back to something that you said and just a minor comment. With this data or this tool at a dealer to basically tell a customer if it will work for their use case, I think is fundamentally probably flawed because I don’t trust a dealer to tell me what is or isn’t going to work when they’re trying to sell me a car.

And I had this same experience. I want to buy an electric pickup, but before I spend $80,000, I need to actually drive that car up to this land and back down in the summer and in the winter to be like, “This is going to do my use case.” And so I think it has to go beyond the data. We have to get people in a car for a day, a week, and then they do it and then they know or they don’t. Because that’s really why I did not buy a car, because I can’t promise myself that it’s actually going to do the job that I’m buying it for unless I could rent one. So now I’m going to rent one.

Nathan Niese:

Francisco?

Francisco Pineda:

Thank you very much. Very interesting points. Just by very quick way of introduction, I started my career in oil and gas upstream but then ended up doing downstream deals. I got very familiar with the gas station and the convenience store model. Fast-forward, I served as a deputy commissioner for New York City’s Economic Development Corporation. I oversaw the city’s commercial industrial real estate portfolio.

And so we were having very advanced conversations about adding EV chargers to our very large campuses and other large real estate. Brooklyn Navy Yard is an example of the type of project that had come out of the EDC. In that case it was spun out as a standalone public benefit corporation, but I had several navy yards in my portfolio.

And so I’m of two minds. And I’m listening to this really intently. I’m not going to sidetrack us because I thought the electricity load presentation was fascinating. And some of the questions I had, too, about the shaping of the charging and I appreciate the answers to that.

So I have a Tesla on the West Coast. I split my time between New York and California. But I also saw how challenging in the Northeast it was to build the network. And I would add that unless you were a small property owner with some interesting real estate, it really, at least what I saw in the Northeast, it kind of came down to the municipalities.

And there were a lot of incentives. We had a lot of incentives. Federal and state funding to push that forward. We didn’t have the technical expertise, and it wasn’t as simple as hiring WSP (a globally recognized professional service firm) or a large engineering firm to help us out. It was really around the entire operations model, the revenue model.

Long story short, I really ended up working with the team to move us to a fully outsourced model and bring in Anesco https://anesco.com/to roll these out and be part of our overall planning process. But it’s very slow moving. A lot of stakeholder…a lot of NIMBYism and blocking and so it is fascinating. I think I agree anecdotally that we’re moving and more and more users are getting converted.

But I wonder whether this is just a question of it reaching a steady state, at some level, where there’s 60-70% EVs and still for the next 50, 60, 70 years having the gasoline engine vehicles still part of our overall mix. What I’m surprised though is that you don’t see more gas stations with these EV chargers, but just thinking out loud and learning.

Jay Smith:

I think I can help answer that question. And Darren said this earlier, the same thing, why aren’t there more of these chargers? Or can we see chargers at these gas stations? I think the question is, “Yeah. Well, why don’t we?” And there actually is a reason, and we’ve talked about a little bit before about that competition. Who are they competing against? Are they competing against the utilities? Are they competing against the municipality who’s going to offer these services?

EV Charging Garrett mentioned kind of like there needs to be a free market approach to this. And so really kind of my question, Gabe mentioned something about in Europe, but I’m wondering if he knows the answer, when you see these all over streets, corners, and things like that, those are the slow chargers, but do you see the fast charger at the gas station right next door? Because it almost seems like why would you invest in putting that in if the free one is at the Starbucks across the street?

Gabe Klein:

Yes, I went over to Europe last April and went to Paris, Amsterdam, and London. Met with the city governments but also the national governments and then took tours in each city. They were all impressive in different ways. But what was interesting to me is that the ubiquity and the visual aspect of the charging was all level two in the public space that I saw.

And then I went to a very impressive BP Pulse installation, but it was in a parking garage down below. It was also near a rental car. This was in London. And so it had a very active usage from Hertz, I believe, nearby, also people that lived in this massive building, and then people that would come in to use it. But most of the level two charging that I saw, I would say like 60-70% was being used when I saw it. So like the light post was being utilized, or in Amsterdam by the canal. Because also in Europe, they’ve gotten rid of parking on a lot of streets. They’ve gotten rid of cars period in a lot of places, either through congestion pricing or just slimming down lanes and getting rid of cars in cities. And so they had to be very careful where they chose to utilize the level two charging, and in Amsterdam it was all the perpendicular parking by the canals that I saw. But most of the stations were being utilized. And I think that’s what we would see here if we got off our duffs and did more in the public space. And, a lot of that needs to be done at the city level and we just don’t have a lot of movement there.

We’ve got good pilots and proof of concept in New York City. We’ve had some interesting stuff in LA, some in Portland, but we don’t really have a national program. And there’s a lot of reasons I could go into if we had more time, but I think that it’s desperately, desperately needed because the early adopters are actually urbanites for the most part and inner ring suburbanites.

Jay Smith:

Yes, I agree. I feel like they almost work against each other. The more level two and the, “Hey, I can go and get this everywhere,” it is going to make the gas station think, “Do I need to invest in a DCFC?” Because we all just heard the statistic, 90% of the drivers only drive 100 miles. You probably don’t need that fast charger if the municipality and everybody’s going to make it available along every street. And so it’s kind of like one will actually affect the other.

Gabe Klein:

Well, yes and no, right? Because that’s the sort of shrinking pie mentality. And I think what we have to understand is that we’re in the very, very early days in terms of penetration and adoption. And so it’s chicken and the egg. If you see these up and down your block, you’re like, “Oh, there is charging everywhere.” And that’s what people want to know. Then you get the massive adoption you see in Norway or you see in China and the gas station’s also going to be busy.

Our problem is we’re not getting to that tipping point and a lot of people aren’t buying because they don’t see charging, and the Washington Post, New York Times, everybody keeps reinforcing it. And so if we can get over that, everybody’s going to be busy and gas will be by the wayside.

Darren Palmer:

I would agree with you. I’ve seen all over Europe as well. Also, we spoke earlier, level two is pretty easy to put in. It’s also pretty easy to load balance. I’d like to introduce another concept you may have spoken about before, we’ve thought about, and we called it grazing. So I don’t if you use that term, but it’s like there’s chargers everywhere and everywhere you go you just do a quick plug and those chargers are in the best parking positions.

So you go to shops, usually you want the charge to be near the infrastructure, which is the store, therefore the parking positions nearest the store are the electric ones and you can only park there if you’ve got electric and you plug in everywhere you go. So as you go shopping, shop, plug in for two hours, then you go to the hairdresser, plug in for an hour, that kind of grazing.

And sometimes they’re free. They’re the ones that tend to be free. They’re the non-premium. Some of them charge below the rate of a standard level two charger actually. You have no idea what the rate is unless you’re looking it up. And a lot of customers, new customers, don’t own EVs, they don’t even know the difference really between a level two and the different kilowatts and a DC. They really don’t. And after they start to learn, then they realize one is for journeys and one is for when you’ve parked for a long time. The education level is still so low they don’t even know what a level two is and level three is we found.

Garrett Fitzgerald:

Darren, you brought up a point that actually Gabe brought up earlier, this concept of free charging. And I think it’s actually doing a disservice or a harm, I think, to overall adoption and especially if we want to shape the behavior.

If we set the expectation that charging is free, how are any of us going to make money operating chargers in the future when we already talked about, “Well, if a public DC fast charger may need to cost two or three times as much, but most of the OEMs are offering a year or two years of free public network and then all of a sudden you jump to…” We have to think through what is the journey that the customer goes through. And sort of the experience, I think, is something that maybe isn’t as simple as, “Make it free and more people will adopt it.”

And the grazing, I have not heard that term, but I do think it makes a lot of sense. But those ones I think are actually the ones that are more often broken. The level two at the grocery store is free and there’s zero motivation to fix it once you’ve got that grant to install it. So we think about how do we sustain those beyond just the folks who took the grant, got it in there, and then it just gets dust.

Darren Palmer:

Strategy So you made me think of one thing. I just watched the Spotify movie again recently. And their whole model was “free”- they had a free version and then the paid version. It was hugely successful. You could have free and you get free and it’s great, it gets you in. But once you realize how much you love it and if you want to have a personalized playlist, then you have to pay and everybody does. So their model worked great.

So one point of view could be the free gets…I don’t mean at DC, I mean at level two…the free gets you: “There’s chargers everywhere and electric cars are great.” But once you buy it you realize you can have the free, it’s for maybe when you’re parked at a level two. But when you want premium, which is on a journey and I want it really fast, that’s when you have to pay for it.

It doesn’t fix everything you mentioned there. And I tend to agree with you on the free DC fast charge. It can block up chargers and set an expectation that it’s free and that doesn’t really support take up across the country. I tend to agree with you on that one.

Nathan Niese:

I see we’re getting to the end of time here. Been a really robust discussion. So maybe I’ll try to summarize in a minute or so and we can always look forward to the next one. Again, really appreciate the presentation today.

Garrett got us started in terms of this good set of Q&A and comment period. You started with the lens, in many ways, of the utility. We spent a good amount of time there talking about demand charges and other aspects related to the rate card, but then quickly migrated into, as we generally do, talking about awareness and aspects about the customer that continue to be really important. Then found our way talking about the retailer perspective, which was excellent, and then finished with more of that customer back view, which is always good to ground ourselves in: “What is the customer thinking?”

So I think we covered a lot of ground, maybe not as staying in one lane as we thought we might given the presentation that you had, Garrett, but it was really a fantastic discussion and I appreciate everyone really weighing in and participating. Back to you, Roy. Any final words you or the team want to share before we call it a wrap this time?

Roy Strasburger:

All right. Nathan and Mike, thank you very much for facilitating today. It was great. Just a couple of last comments that I’m going to make. Chris mentioned in the chat that L1, 2, and DCFC chargers are different use cases, which I think we’re getting around to when we’re talking about how there are different charging needs. We’ll try to include those chat comments in the transcript.

Chat Comments:

Chris Normandeau:

L1,2, and DCFC chargers are different use cases though. Generally people use DCFCs when they need them, while they use L2 when they’re available and could top off a little.

Jay Smith:

Agree, they are used differently. EV adoption hasn’t reached levels yet where a gas station with a DCFC isn’t worried about L2s.

Gabe Klein:

In Westminster, they were putting L2 in streetlights in 45 minutes (retrofit)! 3 kw and 7kw is what I saw.

Garrett Fitzgerald:

How prevalent are “free” DCFCs with the purchase of a car? Similar to the old Tesla model to use the Super Charger Network.

Darren Palmer:

The reference was for DCFS where manufacturers offer e.g., a year of free DCFC.

Tom Healey:

We only have one site with free DCFCs as required under a contractual obligation. Not aware of other free DCFC other than at dealerships.

Roy Strasburger:

Also, unfortunately we did not have a chance to hear from Deb or Fred today. We will do next time. But just want to say thank you very much, everybody, for helping us with the VGN mission of trying to educate people and spread knowledge to others. Our motto is, “Sharing Today to Shape Tomorrow,” and you guys really participated with that, so we do thank you for that.

I’m really excited to announce that we are planning and putting together a VGN summit for November, the week of November 17th, for which we’re inviting all of our VGN groups and members to join us. We will have a presenter, probably a futurist, to be with us, but then for all of our different we’re going to ask them to present a very short presentation about what they’ve talked about and what some of the hot topics are for them. We have just over 100 VGN members in different groups and have a chance for all of them to get together to have a discussion with folks like yourselves.

So we will be sending out more information on that. Robert Hampton, who’s on our call today, is helping VGN with its strategic development and we really appreciate the work he’s doing to putting this summit together.

Eva Strasburger:

And just to jump in, Roy, to be clear, it’s a three-hour virtual meeting. It’s not going to be an in-person one.

Roy Strasburger:

Thank you. Anything else? Eva and then Myra.

Eva Strasburger:

I was going to mention to Darren that he may not be aware that we have several other Vision Groups. We have seven groups at the moment that are focused on the convenience store industry. And with our Convenience Leaders Vision Group, as well as the Convenience Technology Vision Group, we’ve discussed EVs and we have reports which you’ll find in our Vision Report Library, which might answer some of your questions about why they are not doing more or are they doing more.

Darren Palmer:

Thank you. We’ll have a look at that.

Roy Strasburger:

Myra?

Myra Kressner:

Yes. Well, thank you, everyone. And I know we’re just about over time, so I’ll be very quick. We also do have a Global Convenience Vision Group and quite a number of the companies that have been mentioned in terms of their EV ubiquity are actually members of our Global Convenience Vision Group. So we’ll perhaps have more to share in that regard with all of you at a future meeting. As well as the fact that, Roy, Eva and I in just a few weeks will be at the convenience industry’s European summit in Copenhagen. And again, there will be quite a large representation there from some of the companies that have been mentioned in their European execution. So we’ll have more to share with the group on our next meeting.

Roy Strasburger:

Mike, thanks again for facilitating. I’ll let you say your thank you and we’ll wrap it up.

Mike Austin:

Yes, I’ll keep it brief. But I learned a lot and I think this was the best discussion we’ve had yet. A lot of thought starters for me and a great presentation. And thanks to everyone, and especially thanks to Roy, Eva, and Myra for putting this all together. And Nathan for co-facilitating.

Myra Kressner:

Thanks for all of the applause. Thank you to all of you. Again, you are probably the most diverse group that we have. And again, your sharing and in some cases agreement or disagreement with your fellow members, we really commend you and applaud you for participating in this manner.

And I know that Eva, Roy, Robert and I are thinking, oh, every comment that Gabe made and Jay and others about, “We need more education, we need more education,” we’re going to try and figure out how we can certainly help facilitate that. But that’s all thanks to all of you for participating as graciously as you all have been. So thank you for that.

Roy Strasburger:

And we will be back in touch very shortly. If you have any ideas of what topics you would like to discuss, please share them. So, thanks again to Garrett. Great presentation. Thank you for putting the time and effort in. And as you all know, Garrett is a fellow member. So thank you very much and have a good rest of your afternoon.